Confessions
by icedwrath
Summary: A look inside the hearts, minds, and perhaps the very souls of a few chosen Sailor Senshi. Yuri overtones abound, so only proceed if you like such.
1. 01 Heart On Fire

**Heart Burning**

**I-claim-not: I own nothing, certainly not the mind of Rei Hino or the mind, body or soul of any character in the Sailor Moon Universe. Or any universe, for that matter.**

**An introspective look at Rei's unfulfilled desires for Usagi.**

**I burn.**

**Fitting, since I am the very priestess of the fire element itself, but it is not a natural fire that burns within me. No, the flames that encircle my heart and reduce it to ash are from the pure, holy inferno sparked by true love.**

**The spark has been struck in two universes, two lifetimes, two destinies. Destinies that are depressingly similar. And so, I also burn – with rage. Not at the cause of my inner hell, and not at fate – I am consumed with rage at myself. For meekly trying to accept destiny. For not having the courage to tell her how I feel – in the Silver Millennium, Crystal Tokyo – anywhere at all. For every tear I have shed alone. For every dream shattered, every hope destroyed. There truly is no way for what I desire to ever be. It just isn't going to happen. Not here, not now, and not ever.**

**So instead, I must endure the flames of my passion alone. I burn so fiercely and brightly that I cannot believe my friends and fellow warriors haven't noticed it. They must be too wrapped up in their own bliss to see the obvious right before them.**

**I do not begrudge bliss. I burn, but I am not bitter. From the first cinder I knew it was hopeless – a quest unresolvable, a journey with no end. Yet within the flames, over the crackle and roar, is the wisp of a silent scream, fragile as smoke. It is my inner voice that dares ask questions my conscious self long lost the courage to utter.**

**Do I not deserve to be happy?**

**Do I not deserve to be fulfilled?**

**Do I not deserve… her?**

**Do I? I wonder. Why don't I do something about this burning? Just bust right out with a confession and see what happens? Am I that afraid of what they will think? What she will think?**

**Not as much as I'm afraid of what she might do.**

**I am terrified. I can't disrupt the harmony of a perfect future. Even if I must sacrifice my own future to ensure it is so. I can't have a future with her. She is too important, too vital to the continued balance. As long as everyone stays within their destined roles, peace and prosperity are assured.**

**No matter what the cost to their individual futures.**

**However, I am sure I am alone in this. No one could possibly have such a fixation on our Queen. No one else but me would dare covet the position of her King, both personally and professionally. No one would understand, and prosecution and humiliation would be swift.**

**No. I will not besmirch my Queen's honor. I will not bring her down with me. I will continue this struggle, unseen and unknown by everyone. I will continue burning.**

**Up until they light my funeral pyre. Then I will burn literally as well as inside. By then though, my struggle will be over. I will no longer be suffering in the flames of self-purgatory. I will be free from the flames – at least the flames I have known in life.**

**Whether I will burn on afterwards for my sinful, shameful desires that could ruin all lives but mine – that is a sentence I will have no difficulty accepting.**

**However it is I burn, be it for eternity or just in my spiritual heart, I know that either way I will never truly have this fire extinguished – it has charred marks into the very foundation of my soul – which is also made of fire.**

**Please, let me become the fire. Let it melt my flesh and bones until nothing but its heat and light are my air and water. Then, through this transcendence, I need never endanger the future. I beg you, let me become the fire.**

**Before the fire becomes me.**


	2. 02 Heart Under Pressure

**Water Falling**

**I-claim-not: As previously, I own no mind, heart, body, or soul of any character in any universe of any anime. I do this for fun, never profit. Besides, that would be illegal!**

**A sequel of sorts to Heart Burning. That's all I'm giving up, so read on if you're interested.**

**I have a confession to make. I am not as satisfied with my lover as I pretend to be. I have pretended for so long, that to even my most intimate of friends I could never be more then the dedicated partner I appear to be.**

**It isn't her fault. It isn't mine either. If I were forced to blame something, I would project such venom on time itself. Not it's embodiment, though – that woman could never be held responsible for the way my feelings have dimmed over the years.**

**Why not? I hear you ask. Surely, since she has the power to control time, she is in some way responsible for the current plight I'm in. In a totally unaltered time stream, my love would never have had the chance to fade.**

**I would be persuaded to agree with you – if I didn't know the truth. It isn't an alteration of time that has affected my feelings – it is simply its mere passage. Not even it's chosen champion can predict or contend with the awe inspiring, awful power of what the journey of time will do. In the end, it will reduce everything to dust, but before lives and dreams reach that ultimate stage of decay, what position will they be in?**

**Who can ever say what their life will look like after a crisis has run its course?**

**Who would dare?**

**Certainly not me. I no longer dance with fate or scream unabashedly in its face – I just embrace it, holding my breath and anticipating its next move. I find that now much more exciting then fighting it.**

**When I was younger, I thought fighting it was the whole point. That if I fought long and hard enough, I would eventually win, and gain the ability to twist my destiny into the shape I desired.**

**How ironic. I thought I did win, so long ago, and the reward, the future I wanted, lay with her. My mate of soul and heart – Haruka. How utterly foolish I was to think I had actually beaten my own fate!**

**Now I hear that same, hardened veteran of countless, pointless battles laughing. The sound is rich with scorn. It knows how I truly feel. It knows, better than I do, when the false bonds I have imposed on it, the mold I have desperately tried to cram it into, will shatter like insubstantial glass.**

**Just like Haruka's heart will break when she finds out what I have known for too long. I want to spare her that pain, but there is no way to articulate – because there are no gentle words for what must inevitably happen. It is a cruel process, the severing of a heart, a world - an entire life from another. What hurts me more is that she will hurt far more than I do. It is magnitudes worse when you don't see it coming.**

**It is sad. I have become detached, a tide that no longer returns to the shore. Once, there would be a reason to stay strong and hold on to these bonds, even if they are choking me inside.**

**The battles we fought are now distant memories. The world has been saved and resaved, some times with little support from the Outer Senshi at all. Lives are now decaying orbits in the gravity well of peace.**

**Never did I think that my life would no longer seem incomplete without her. I still love her, but I don't think I can go on living this way. Poised on a line fraying at both ends, suspended over the bottomless abyss of uncertainty.**

**Either I leap off myself or wait to fall. Neither option has a good outcome. I should just run away, but I don't have the courage to do something that rash. Besides, there's nowhere I could go that my much faster lover could not reach first.**

**Perhaps it was inevitable then, or at the least appropriate, that I find myself intrigued by my total opposite – the spiritual avatar of fire. We have never been close, but I respect her strength and indomitable will to succeed. In this, she reminds me of myself, a lot younger and brasher.**

**I know what you are thinking – that I already have a younger, fresher and overall more appealing model ready to go. I won't blame you for thinking that way – that is how it seems – if you don't understand my nature.**

**I am the furthest thing from the cunning, conniving seductress. I have no ulterior motive, no ultimate plan of getting in her pants. At the most I would like to be someone she calls friend, or at the least, calls. I don't know how to go about it – I have always received moves, never performed any of my own. Not that I'm going to make a move as such at her, I don't want her to take it the wrong way.**

**Which leaves me at an impasse. I have no skills in this department, and I'm not even sure what I want. Do I want to have a full relationship with her like I have had with Haruka? I don't know if I could have had anything like I've had with Haruka.**

**Then why are you considering leaving her? Your inevitable follow up question is an arrow poised right above my churning heart. Why should I even contemplate this? Have I not conquered fate?**

**I've torn out its very heart and swallowed it whole, but now foul, acidic bile is creeping up my guts and the sour, acrid taste of defeat is manifesting on the back of my tongue.**

**Before I regurgitate its foul core I will swallow my pride and step off into the abyss. Whatever waits for me there is surely better than my destiny springing back into its old parameters. At least, that is what I have chosen to think.**

**Maybe it's only me, but I since I am so attuned to the water, I can feel the disquiet within Rei's soul. She is literally drowning in an ocean of passion – only the waters I know so well are, to her, sheets of blinding, white-hot flame.**

**I know love unrequited when I see it. I am sure the object, the source of such heat, is our Queen herself. Naturally, she is completely clueless about that state of affairs, blinded as she is with her love for our noble King.**

**If I dared, with one breath, one word, one kiss even, I could pour water on her burning soul and show her the peace and tranquility of the sea. If I did take that step though, there is no telling what would happen. At best, I would still be spoken to after some punishment declared by our Queen. At worst, much worse than any justice royalty could mete out, I would be doubly rejected by both of them.**

**If that happened to me, I don't know where I would go from there. There are other girls in the universe. Surely one can give me what I've been seeking.**

**Escape from the encroaching shadows of my destiny, which hungers and thirsts to completely destroy me.**

**Hope for a future I can't see and can no longer believe in.**

**Power to stand strong in the face of change and time, and support when I can no longer stand by myself.**

**Finally, love of my complete self – body, mind, and soul.**

**Did not Haruka give you all of that? you ask, a hint of condescension surfacing in your voice. I am unperturbed. It's about time that showed up.**

**The answer is yes; she did, and still does. The problem is that I can no longer find it.**

**I'm not sure where I go from here, but I know that confessing this has at least made me feel better.**

**Thank you for listening, and before you start tearing me down, think what you would do if you were in my place.**

**If your love was fading…**

**If you were losing hope…**

**If you couldn't turn to anyone…**

**What would you do?**

**Would you rage and cry, drag fate back into your presence and try to crush it into a more pleasing shape?**

**Would you attack what you cherish most, so you don't have to face the truth?**

**Or would you run, hoping never to be found again?**

**Would any of that really help you if you found yourself suspended over an abyss that time itself had opened beneath your feet?**

**You might find yourself reaching for a line from the unlikeliest source, finding, realizing, learning from places and people you never gave credit to before.**

**It is amazing what time's passing can do.**

**When it rolls over you…**

**What will you do?**

**You'll never know – until you are already there.**

**S/N: Before you decide to roast me, I have not that much knowledge of the devotion between Uranus and Neptune. If it is meant to be an eternal, unchangeable bond I tender my regrets for daring to suggest the impossible. Though this is fanfiction, and when has that not been helped by a healthy dose of impossibility? Thus the above regrets are only for offending the intended, original Sailor Moon canon. I don't have a complete knowledge of it, if the above didn't make that blatantly obvious.**


	3. 03 Heart Trapped

**Time Marching**

**I-claim-not: I don't own her. I don't want that responsibility; no matter how much money it would bring me!**

**A confession on wings of flame, soaring toward the moon.**

**A confession born in the deep, rising to meet the sun.**

**I alone know the paths they will take as they travel through events and settings, the endless tapestry of moving life, constantly blurring.**

**Though I know the paths, I cannot anticipate with any accuracy the waypoints and catalysts that will trigger their ultimate arrivals. Even I never see time still.**

**I am time's mistress, or its servant, depending on what I am doing at the time. My enemies fear my power, and my friends respect me. Though I know they are all afraid of me.**

**Who wouldn't be? I have mastery of the element of time itself. What force is more destructive? What else, by mere accumulation, causes withering, failing, and eventually death just in its wake alone?**

**Time can reduce even the greatest of accomplishments to the ash of newborn dreams, the gleanings of hope. The cycle inevitably repeats with the latest batch of visionaries, who no longer have any evidence to support that they are merely, vaingloriously, reinventing the wheel yet again.**

**History repeats itself, and the mistakes and tragedies of the past multiply like bacteria. No matter how much we say we learn, we continue to perpetuate the process. No matter how much we strive to stop it, the formula is engraved in our very nature. We are doomed before we begin, but we die before we come to that horrible realization.**

**I am blessed – or cursed – with the ability to break the cycles of destruction and hopelessness. I don't get the opportunity to do it as much as I'd like, but I never fail to take advantage of the choice when it is available.**

**Why do I talk like this? you ask incredulously. Is this not Crystal Tokyo? Won't this paragon of peace, safety and security endure forever?**

**Sadly, no. Nothing lasts forever, not even time itself. Yes, one day even my power will mean nothing. Before that happens though, I would like to be able to enjoy time's journey as others do. To live, to love, to take for granted the passage of time… even for just a day. To break free of my dour responsibilities and be able to have fun, to embrace the woman I am inside, to hold my soul and shine for the entire universe to see.**

**I sigh, knowing full well that that cannot happen, not anymore. Perhaps in an entirely different, earlier life, before the power of Time was entrusted to me, I had my fill of enjoyment. Perhaps, full of fun and free of care, I accepted my new responsibilities with nary a thought in my head or a trepidation in my heart. I would have been a lot younger, happier, and much more hopeful.**

**Never would that younger self ever truly know the price she had paid until eons, ages – lifetimes later when it hits her like Thor's hammer. I have lost so much – not in reality, but in mere potential. When you have been around as long as I have you understand that potential is energy. I could really use that energy.**

**I am very tired. I am greatly saddened. Before I do this for another eon, I want to be able to share my burdens with somebody. Someone I can be close with. Someone who might, just for a moment, let her fear of me slip away to enjoy the truth within.**

**Who am I kidding? I know a hopeless cause when I hear it. I have been alone so long, but the burden of Time hasn't broken me. I am haggard, bent, disheartened, but I am not broken. I can still endure.**

**I will do this because no one else can. You don't retire from something like this. You can't just quit being the embodiment of an entire element, no matter what the toll taken out on you is. So while the fire keeps burning, the waves keep crashing and the other elements rage in their respective methods I, as the element of Time, must keep marching.  
**

**After all, Time waits for no one, so it isn't like I can slow down.**

**No matter who I leave behind.**

**S/N - I'll leave it up to you to decide which Senshi Setsuna might be pining after. Whoever you think compliments her best; that decision I leave in your capable hands.**


End file.
